For quite some time it has been common for engineers to use a number of computer-based tools to assist with the design process. Various modeling environments, both textual and graphical, can automatically produce either deployable software systems or descriptions of hardware systems that mimic the behavior of either the entire model or portions of the model. Such production of code from a model is often referred to as “code generation.”
Products such as the MATLAB® development environment available from The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Mass. provide a high-level language and interactive modeling environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming.